Many are aware of the recent explosion in the number of decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges. Decentralized exchanges are built with the 0x protocol, which is an open protocol allowing ERC20 tokens to be traded directly on the Ethereum blockchain. This alone make 0x a promising investment. It has also hit a majority of milestones in its road map and was built through several libraries to ease its way into the developer community. It was mentioned on the Coinbase Blog recently as well. For these reasons, Ox is a good investment this year.

Bitcoins are mined with powerful computer hardware and software. A maximum of 21 million Bitcoin will be available, after which no further bitcoins will be produced. The algorithm which governs the production of Bitcoin limits the quantity that will be produced, and the rate at which they will be produced. It is a finite commodity – there is a fixed amount, and that ensures that greater demand will always prop up the price. In this way, it is similar to other finite commodities such as crude oil, silver, or gold.

The morality of darknet markets is not an interesting debate to me. However, the fact ZEC is secure and sought out by people who want their purchases to remain private adds value to the coin from an investment perspective. This value will only deepen as darknet markets continue to grow. The Zcash dev team also recently published technical improvements they claim will reduce the memory consumption of transaction privacy by 98%.the Coinbase blog also recently mentioned Zcash as having great potential.
In 1998, Wei Dai published a description of "b-money", characterized as an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system.[12] Shortly thereafter, Nick Szabo described bit gold.[13] Like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that would follow it, bit gold (not to be confused with the later gold-based exchange, BitGold) was described as an electronic currency system which required users to complete a proof of work function with solutions being cryptographically put together and published. A currency system based on a reusable proof of work was later created by Hal Finney who followed the work of Dai and Szabo.

Bitcoin solves the so called ‘’double spending problem’’ present with digital goods. For example, if I have an mp3 file or an ebook on my computer, I can freely copy that file a thousand times and send it to a thousand different people. For a digital currency, the possibility for unlimited copying would mean a quick hyperinflationary death. Bitcoin solves this by maintaining a peer to peer network and recording each transaction in a public ledger called the block chain. Say I send 1 bitcoin from my bitcoin address to my friend John. The bitcoin network records that transaction in the block chain and I no longer have possession of that bitcoin. The coin ‘’moved’’ from my bitcoin wallet to John’s wallet.